It seems like every day the past week and a half has found us on the road. That makes it hard to be creative in the kitchen! Even if we’re home for most of our meals, just driving all over the place gets exhausting and drains creativity. But, at least I came up with a good Pie of the Week: Chicken Parmesan Pizza!
This is a little different take on the pizzas I’ve been doing lately. But really delicious, nonetheless. It uses ingredients left over from making the blackened chicken wraps yesterday. But we unwrap the wrap, put it on a quasi-neapolitan pizza crust, and give it a couple of minutes in the Roccbox.
I’m not much of a New York style pizza fan. Sorry. In the regional pizza battle, I fall squarely in the Chicago camp (the deep dish, not the thin crust. Chicago offers two powerful indigenous pizza styles…). But this week, as part of my triumphant turkey tribunal, I at least made a pizza based on a “sandwich” named after one of New York’s five boroughs: the Turkey Manhattan.
If you bought into the media hype, you knew winter storm Elliot was going to kill us all. Comparisons to the blizzard of ’78 were flying everywhere, and I understand there was nowhere nearby to get eggs, milk, or bread. In reality, we only got about an inch and a half of snow. But the cold. The cold meant doing everything possible to stay inside! With wind chills approaching -40, traveling any further than the sheep barn was not in the cards for us.
But, Xenia had foraged some winter oyster mushrooms ahead of the storm, and I had some old, leftover Neapolitan style pizza dough. It was really too old to make good pizzas, and since the pizza oven is an outdoor only appliance, I wasn’t going to be making pizzas anyway. But, a savory onion, mushroom, and cheese roll for breakfast? That sounds perfect for a cold day next to the wood stove!
This week, I decided to get a little meta with the pizza. French Onion Pizza: essentially deconstructed French Onion Soup on a Neapolitan style pizza crust. Different. Yummy. Would do again.
The spatchcock chicken recipe I posted Tuesday may have led you to think I abandoned the pie of the week project. Never fear: here’s this week’s: an onion marmalade, walnut, blue cheese pizza!
After making an untold number of farm to flame pizzas the last several weeks, and a bunch of them for thanksgiving, I nearly took a break from my weekly pizza experiments. Sorta. In the end, I did make one I’ve been contemplating for while: chili cheese pizza. I also had my first major pizza failure.
I really miss the large family thanksgiving meals we used to have. Seriously – we rented a school so we could fit everyone in! In just a few short years, it shrunk enough to fit in the second floor community room at Grandma’s retirement/assisted living place. Then, suddenly, completely gone.
The last few years, though, have replaced it with a more intimate gathering. Just my wife and me, going to my Mom’s to make something fun. Occasionally we’ll add in a friend without other plans – this year we had a friend and her child join us. We’ve done a whole turkey and all the fixings, chicken and noodles (a tradition borrowed from my Dad’s side/great aunt), Detroit style pizza, and more. This year, I brought over the Roccbox, and we did Thanksgiving pizzas.
In last week’s pie of the week, I took a detour from the usual round pizza. This week, I went back to something much more traditional: round pizza. With round things on it.